Building a business one day at a time.

SMS marketing. Everyone here is doing it now. It's simple and easy. From a client's point of view it pays for itself so it's not hard to sell, either. Why wouldn't someone try to take advantage of this revolutionary form of marketing?

That being said, I am officially starting my offline/SMS marketing endeavor. I'm going to build my business one day at a time here in my small city. In this thread I will report what I do and how it works out.

Firstly, my town has about 20,000 people in it. There's a college and I'm sure at least 10,000 of the people here are college kids. It's a nice little town where business is thriving!

There is one other company here offering SMS marketing. I'm sure they are using txt180 or some similar service, so I am also sure that they pay no less than 3¢ per text. Fortunately, I'm using Chad Wyatt's WP plugin that works with Twilio, so I only pay 1¢ per text and $1 a month for my phone number.

I will be offering SMS coupon blasts to local businesses. Businesses seem to be all over these blasts because I get 1-3 a day from my competitor's service.

My competitor has 2 local lists. Why two? I don't know. One list has 4600 subscribers and the other list has 3600. They charge 6¢ per text.

Using my system I plan to charge as follows:

5¢ for the first 1,000 texts. (Cost: $50. Cost to me: $10)
4¢ for the next 1,000 texts. (Cost: $90. Cost to me: $20)
3¢ for the next 1,000 texts. (Cost: $120. Cost to me: $30)

Every text after 3,000 will cost 1¢. I believe that this pricing system will be enough incentive for local businesses to come to me for their blasts instead of my competitor.

Now, the only problem I face is building my list. I had a great idea of using a Chrome plugin to export all of my contacts phone numbers and manually add them to my list, but only 50 of my FB friends had phone numbers listed. So in my goal to reach 3,000 subscribers, I have only 50. I want to have at least 1,500 before I approach a business.

So that's it. I'm sure I can beat my competitor and all I need is to grow my list. I've made a connection with the manager of the biggest and most popular local bar and he said if I give him service at my cost he will allow me to stand outside the bar on busy nights and ask people to subscribe. The bar sees about 200 people every night so if I go on Friday and Saturday nights then I should be able to add a good 300 or so people to my list pretty easily.

I am also going to post fliers at the local college. I'm thinking of offering incentive for them subscribing, but I don't have anything to offer!

Also, I plan to go to other bars on busy nights and place 1/4 page fliers on their windshields.

I figure, if I follow through and do everything that I intend to, I should be able to reach 1,000 subscribers within 30 days and the cost to me will be around $25 as well as my time.


I wanted to post this here and update everyone because I feel like having people cheering me on would really help. My girlfriend thinks I'm a joke and I can't even get my friends to subscribe to my list because they don't take me seriously. =/ So if you guys and gals have any advice, suggestions, information, or just want to cheer me on, please do so! I have a lifetime goal of making $36k a year. (After taxes.) That's 3,000 a month. I feel like I could live very comfortably on that and that is all I ever wish to make. SMS marketing is my doorway to doing that!

Thank you, Warriors!